3 The Braque Connection (28 page)

“It doesn’t matter, young lady.” Francine gave Nikki a stern look. “Around here we talk like ladies.”

Vinnie and Colin laughed, relieving some of the anxiety in the room.

“We have less than six hours until five o’clock,” I said when the laughter had died down, and before Francine could argue with Vinnie about her ladylike behaviour. “I need to figure out what Kubanov has planned.”

“Got it.” Francine grabbed Vinnie’s arm. “Come on, big guy. Let’s leave Genevieve to do her thing.”

Vinnie allowed her to pull him to the door, but he turned back, a serious look on his face. “Those people aren’t your family, Jen-girl. We are.”

“She’s going to say something about blood and genetics and biology.” Francine pointed a shiny brown nail at me. “Don’t you dare say that. Blood isn’t thicker than water. We are your family. Capiche?”

“The density of blood really is thicker than water, Francine. You should know… Is this an expression?”

“You bet your ass it is.” Vinnie winced when Francine slapped him again. “Sorry, punk. Jen-girl, you’re ours. Deal with it.”

Francine blew me a kiss and winked at Nikki, then pulled Vinnie out the conference room.

“They’re right, you know?” Nikki eased away from me, enough to still feel her body heat, but no longer in full contact. The tension in my muscles decreased significantly.

“About what?” I asked, distracted by the unidentified underpaintings.

“The old guy, the big punk and the model treat you like family. Your parents don’t. I think the big punk is right.” She lifted one slender shoulder.

“How do you know how families treat each other?” I asked.

Colin stiffened next to me. “Jenny, um, maybe—”

“I spent a lot of time with my friends in America.” Nikki didn’t look uncomfortable with the question, despite Colin’s concern. “I’m an only child and my father is—was—a big-time criminal, so I had to watch them to know what a family is like. They’re like you guys. Except you’re weird and they’re not.”

Colin chuckled. “What are you doing here?”

“Mister Manny told me to wait here.”

Things had been happening so fast, I hadn’t had time to consider all the questions around Nikki’s presence. “How long had you been waiting in here before I came in?”

“Only a few minutes. Some police-type people fetched me yesterday and put me on a plane to come here. No one told me anything.” Any trace of light-heartedness disappeared, sadness taking its place. “Until you did. Thank you.”

Colin looked at me. “Jenny, is this—”

“—Monique, Hawk’s daughter.”

“Jesus.” He shook his head. I didn’t know if it was to erase his swearing, express his disbelief or to show his understanding of the complexity of this new development.

“Do you want me to leave now?” Nikki’s question was soft and hesitant, as if not wanting an answer. Her eyes were on Colin and she moved back to be in full contact with me again. “I promise I’ll be quiet. You won’t even know I’m here. I won’t even move.”

“That’s not possible.” I saw her expression and it took me less than a second to understand her disappointment. “I mean it is not possible to not move. You’ll move, but it’s okay. If you sit quietly somewhere and don’t disturb me while I think, I don’t mind.”

“You sure, Jenny?”

I nodded, already walking towards the paintings. In the background I heard Colin offer Nikki food, her voice eager when she accepted. At some point I heard Phillip’s deep voice, but I was too focussed on the underpaintings and what they could mean. These places had significance. Kubanov had researched not only me and Colin, but also my parents. He knew where I had been born and where I had been schooled. Then he had commissioned an artist to paint scenes from those places. Were the remaining paintings someone else’s residential history? If so, was it Colin’s? Someone else’s? I needed to check my suspicions.

“Can I go with you?” Nikki’s voice stopped me at the door. I had forgotten about her.

“Yes.” I walked to my office and heard her hurried footsteps following me. I swiped my key card to open the door to my viewing room.

“Wow. This is supercool.” Nikki walked past me and turned in a circle, taking in the detail of my room. “You work here?”

“This is my viewing room.” I sat down at the computer and opened an internet search engine.

“Can I sit here?”

I turned and saw Nikki at Colin’s desk. Her eyes kept wandering to a large sketchpad.

“It’s Colin’s desk. You have to ask him.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.” I was wasting time answering her questions. “Oh, just come and sit here next to me.”

From a drawer under my desk, I took a notepad and a pack of newly sharpened pencils and gave it to her as she settled in the office chair next to me. She looked small in the large chair. Her eyes widened when she took the notepad and pencils. “Awesome. Thanks.”

About ten minutes later, I had confirmed my suspicion only fifty percent. That wasn’t confirmation. The glass door to the team room opened and Colin walked in. He stopped and looked in surprise at Nikki quietly drawing. His eyes narrowed when he focussed on the notepad and he walked closer.

“This is really good.”

“Oh, thanks.” Nikki gave him a quick smile and returned to the notepad.

“I need Francine.” I got up and walked to the team room, Colin following me. “Actually, I need everyone.”

“What have you got?”

“I think I know the message behind the underpaintings.”

Francine stopped typing on her keyboard. “What is it?”

“I don’t have enough data to support my suspicion, but I think Kubanov is targeting all of us.”

“Where is she?” Manny walked into the team room and looked around. “Is Monique here?”

“Nikki, and she is in my viewing room.”

His posture relaxed a bit. “Oh, good. I was worried she ran away.”

“Why would she do that?” I hadn’t observed any such intentional cues.

“Why? Because she threatened to do it all the way from the airport. The officers who brought her here considered putting cuffs on her.”

“They were total ass-wipes.” Nikki stood in the open door to my viewing room. She looked tense, her eyes shifting to me constantly.

“Watch your language, young lady.” Francine looked at Nikki from under her brow, negating her severe look with a wink. “Come stand here and watch me work magic on the computer. What do you need, Genevieve?”

“I need all of you to come with me to the conference room.” I walked to the door, not waiting for their responses. I knew they would follow me.

“Do you need Phillip as well?” Francine asked as I stepped into the conference room.

“Yes.”

“I’ll get him,” Manny said. “Don’t start without us.”

While I was waiting for Manny and Phillip to join us, I studied each underpainting with my newfound suspicions. I felt cold when I recognised another painting.

“Okay, what did I miss?” Manny was standing at the far end of the conference table, next to Phillip. I quickly told him about my parents’ visit.

“And you now think something is going to happen at five o’clock today?” Manny’s question came out forceful in its displeasure.

“Yes. I also have a suspicion that these underpaintings are our history.”

“What do you mean?” Vinnie asked, glaring at the paintings.

“Three of these paintings show my life history.” I pointed at the first underpainting my mother identified. “This one is where I spent my elementary school years. That one is my high school years and that one is where I lived when I studied in Oxford. It is a cubist view of the street my apartment was in.”

“Oh shit.” Francine walked along the wall. “What about the other fourteen paintings?”

“There are five of you. I think each person has two or three underpaintings showing parts of your life.” I walked to a painting that I particularly liked. “From Manny’s biography on Interpol, I know he was born in Birmingham. In this painting you can see the Joseph Chamberlain Memorial Clock Tower.”

“Holy hell.” Manny walked closer in long, angry strides. “That was my university.”

“I know. I need you to look for buildings or landscapes that were part of your childhood or life in these paintings. I think there are two for each of you.” I was still speaking when everyone starting walked around the room, stopping at the paintings. None of the body language I observed was relaxed. I pulled out a chair and as soon as I sat down, Nikki was sitting next to me.

“You won’t know I’m here.”

“I know now you’re here. Your reasoning is flawed.”

She leaned a bit closer to me. “You’re like totally weird, you know. But in like a really cool way.”

“High praise coming from a teenager.” Colin sat down. He tried to disguise it, but I saw concern unlike any I’d observed before. “There are three paintings with places from my life. How did he get this, Jenny?”

“That fucker is dead.” Vinnie sat down, but stood up again to pace along the length of the room. “He’s got my Aunt Theresa’s street there. I lived with her for some time when I was a kid. How the fuck did he know this?”

Francine wasn’t correcting Vinnie’s use of swear words. She was pale as she stood in front of a painting. “This is my dad’s church.”

One by one, everyone identified paintings depicting parts of their lives. Manny and Phillip had two paintings each, the rest of us had three. I didn’t know if that had meaning.

“Okay, so now we know this sicko is after us. But we’ve known this all along.” Vinnie eventually calmed enough to sit down. He was still shifting a lot in his chair. “We also know something is going to happen at five. What would that be?”

“I don’t know yet.” I felt powerless. The people in this room needed to be protected and I didn’t know from what. A ringtone sounded loudly in the room.

Manny took his smartphone from his jacket pocket. “It’s the results from the two statues. They were both printed. The lab says they could actually see the layers once they knew what to look for.”

“Two statues?” Phillip asked. “I thought there was only the one from Colin’s safe house.”

“Kubanov gave Jenny a Costa Rican Sukia figure.”

Phillip drew a sharp breath. “Can I see it?”

“Here.” Manny handed him his phone after finding the photos he took in my apartment.

Phillip’s brows lifted high on his forehead. “This is the statue I bought for my parents the week before they died. I buried it with them. And I might have mentioned it to Angelique once.”

“That bitch,” Francine muttered, scowling. “That was how Kubanov knew about this.”

“When was that?” I asked softly. The pain on Phillip’s face was hurting me.

“Twenty-three years ago. They died in a freak yachting accident.”

Francine put her hand on Phillip’s arm and smiled sadly when he looked at her. “I’m sorry for your loss, Phillip.”

Nothing else was said for a long time. I could clearly see everyone was overwhelmed by the knowledge that Kubanov knew so much about us.

“Back to work.” Manny slapped both hands on the table. “We will not let this arsehole scare us. We’re going to find out where that shipment is, Doc is going to Mozart her way into finding out Kubanov’s endgame and we’re going to put him away for life.”

He stood up and waited until everyone was standing before he nodded and walked out the room.

“Mozart is not a verb,” I said as I followed Colin out the conference room. “I wish people would stop using it as such.”

“What do you guys do here? Are you like art cops?” Nikki asked from behind me. I looked around and saw her carrying her notepad. Had she been drawing even in the bad light of the conference room?

“Something like that.” Colin nodded at her notepad. “I suggest you pretend that you don’t hear anything we say here.”

I watched the expressions on her face. Young people seldom had well-developed skills at deception and masking their emotions. On Nikki’s face I saw understanding of the situation. I wondered how many times Hawk had told her to pretend to not hear anything. How many times she had overheard crimes being planned. She nodded once as we entered my viewing room. I watched her sit down on the floor between two of my cabinets. She pulled a pencil from her ponytail and started drawing.

“Something about the woodwork doesn’t make sense.” I turned to Colin sitting next to me. “Why would Hawk have a workshop in his warehouse?”

“My dad hated woodwork.” Nikki lifted her shoulders up to her ears in a classic tortoise posture, trying to disappear when we turned around to look at her. “Sorry, sorry. I’m not here. I don’t hear anything.”

“No, wait. Have you been to your dad’s warehouse?” I asked.

“Many times. There was never a workshop there.”

“When is the last time you were there?”

“The last time I was in the country. Nine months ago.”

I looked at Colin. “It is possible that he had that installed more recently. To what end?”

We turned back to face the monitors and discussed a few ideas, but none of them were viable. Either they were too farfetched to be considered as options or they didn’t fit Kubanov’s previous behaviour.